Part 1: A justification (or lack thereof) and an introduction

“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”

• English proverb

I will not attempt to justify my writing of this article beyond that I find this to be an interesting topic of discussion and that I felt the need to comprehensively put my thoughts into words. Furthermore, I will not accept any constructive criticisms, unconstructive criticisms, Instagram DMs, or good-intentioned attempts to reach out and try to ascertain the state of my mental health.

Now, to put it briefly, the idea behind writing this article stems from a question possibly as old as humanity itself: “How many toddlers do you think you could take in a fight?” * Common answers to this question might offer estimates in the range of twenty. Some braver and more daring individuals might even prize themselves at around fifty to sixty toddlers. Now personally I don’t claim to be particularly brave or daring, but I am the coolest person I know which leads me to conclude that I would be able to genuinely win a fight against every single toddler in the world (around 615.5 million and counting).

I will clarify here that, although I do generally feel an incredible sense of disdain towards young children, I do not have and will never have any intention to actually perform any of the actions that I will detail in this article. I have no desire to hurt toddlers or anyone for that matter. The following ideas are meant to serve as entertainment and in no way should be taken as a genuine threat of violence towards children.

With all that out of the way, let’s begin…

Part 2: Rules and background for the fight

Firstly, let’s take a look at the stats of who I will be theoretically fighting:

The CDC defines a “toddler” as being a child between the ages of one and three, but I will be generalizing them as being about two years old to ensure that all of my opponents will be able to walk, communicate with one another, and conceivably throw punches and kicks. The average two-year-old is around 2’10 and weighs around 27 pounds.

In contrast, I am seventeen years old, 6’3, and weigh around 180 pounds. Using our previously determined averages, the toddlers I would be fighting against would stand just below my waist. On a semi-unrelated note, I could probably bench press around three or four toddlers.

Next, let’s look at the rule set I will be using for this brawl:

I will begin with a potentially controversial determination: the toddlers and I will be limited to using only punches, kicks, grappling moves, and other such blows. Biting, scratching, or the use of any sharp objects to tear, scratch, or otherwise stab will be off-limits for both participating parties. My reasoning behind this is that if the toddlers were allowed to use knives or forks or some other sort of handheld weapon, they might accidentally injure themselves, which would probably be quite entertaining but also a liability for me to get sued. Furthermore, if the toddlers were allowed to bite or scratch me, I would essentially be fighting an endless army of dogs, and seeing as to how I most likely would not be able to beat one dog in a fair fight, I would be sure to lose.

Armor and firearms will also be prohibited in addition to the attacking of the genitals or eyes as per MMA standard rulesets as well as common courtesy.

Another important aspect that will have to be determined is the terrain of where the fight will occur. Will I be surrounded on all sides? Will I have a height advantage? Will I harness the military strategy and strength of the mighty Spartans and choose to funnel all of my enemies through a single tight space as an army of three hundred Spartans once did to defeat a numerically superior enemy of Persians? Conversely, will I take them all on at once?

My answer here would be that it does not matter. Rain or shine, winter or summer, day or night: I will win regardless. Therefore, I will be awarding myself no unfair advantages, dub-ensuring freebies, or other such tactical gimmicks. I will be placing myself in the most unfair and disadvantageous position possible. Our theoretical fight today will take place on a perfectly flat field and the toddlers will spawn in a formation that completely surrounds me on all sides. Still, I am confident in my own abilities so let me explain how I would beat these odds…

Part 3: My tactics and supporting arguments

As surely as the sun rises in the east every morning, I am sure that I could defeat a toddler in a one-on-one matchup. They are simply too small and too frail to pose any serious threat to me. Important to consider here is also that a 2’10” toddler would not even be able to punch me in the face. The only threat that toddlers would pose to me would be in numbers; even the puny strength of the toddler could prove incredibly dangerous to my person when administered in exponentially increasing amounts.

Therefore, one of my most important assets in this fight will be my height and weight. My wide wingspan and long legs will enable me to attack toddlers long before they come into the range of hurting me. My wingspan will additionally prevent me from taking any damage to my head (although my legs, feet, and waist would still be very vulnerable). Additionally, my oversized head and humongous, dumptruck bottom will enable me to stay balanced, even when receiving attacks from all directions.

Now, at this point, some irritating questions might be floating around in your head: why is this guy so confident? What does he know that we don’t? What’s his deal? What’s his shtick? What’s he got planned? Why did Paul Blart: Mall Cop get a sequel, but The Amazing Spiderman never finished its trilogy? Well, without further ado, here it finally is; my grand plan; my magnum opus; my Joker from The Dark Knight-level plan to destroy Batman and the people of Gotham’s spirits; my Ocean’s Eleven-level scheme to rob the Bellagio vault; my Avengers: Endgame strategy to get all of the Infinity Stones from various points in time and revive the trillions killed by Thanos; my - you get the idea.

The way I will defeat the toddler army will be by doing nothing at all. I will allow them to defeat themselves and here’s how.

If you’ve been alive at all in the past two years, you will definitely recall the tragedy that took place at Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert. Furthermore, if you’ve been alive at all in the past forty years, you’ll remember the Hillsborough disaster in the United Kingdom. The similar occurrence in both of these events is the presence of a “crowd crush.” A crowd crush is a catastrophic incident in which a group of people becomes so tightly packed that the density of people per square meter exceeds four or five bodies. People caught in crowd crushes become asphyxiated and can die from lack of oxygen and ability to breathe.

So let’s apply this to our toddler situation. We’ve got 600 million toddlers in a massive field, they’ve been told to attack one random, strangely-handsome fellow in the middle of the group. What do you think the toddlers will do?

1. Stand in orderly lines and wait patiently for their turn to swing on the pasty ginger.
   

2. Immediately start pushing and running into one another in their hurry to get to the middle.

If you answered A, you should watch Blank Check starring Miguel Ferrer. Then you’ll see how obvious it is that EVERY single (or taken) toddler on the planet Earth would pick option B. They would immediately begin shoving, pushing, and surging forward with absofruitely no regard for one another’s safety or mental wellbeing and the kind of reckless abandon that toddlers are known to have.

I have zero doubts in my mind that, if this fight were to actually occur, the toddlers would manage to deplete virtually all of their numbers, solely by causing a massive crowd crush that would result in hundreds of millions of toddler deaths. And, again, I would be in zero danger here because the pressure would really only be applied to my legs (again I am greater than or equal to twice the size of an average toddler). So, in theory, the only damage I should be sustaining here should be maybe some sore knees and a couple of stomped-on toes.

After most of the toddlers have been suffocated and perished in what we’ll respectfully call The Tragic Toddler Trouncing, the remaining children would most likely be so disoriented by watching such an uncountable number of unfathomable horrors happen right beside them that their attitudes towards fighting me would range between some level of reluctant to straight-up unwilling, leaving me with the relatively simple job of dispatching the remaining children. It’s also important to note here that the sheer amount of deceased toddlers would likely create a large enough barrier of bodies between me and the remaining toddlers that I would be able to completely block out the living toddlers and outlast the rest of the kids purely through attrition seeing as to how younger children require more amounts of food and water to survive due to their rapidly growing and developing bodies.

For this reason, I have no doubt that, even in the most disadvantaged possible situation, I would still prevail against the immense forces of my enemy.

However, I will admit, there remains the possibility that something unforeseen and unexpected might happen that would result in my loss. For this reason, I have compiled a number of conjectural possibilities in the next part and will elaborate further there.

Part 4: Hypothetical situations that might occur and thwart my best efforts to persevere

Hypothetical A: The toddlers break the laws of space and time and assimilate together into a super being: Goramandu the God Killer.

Murphy’s Law states, “Whatever can happen, will happen.” Seeing as to how there is a fraction of a chance (however infinitely small) that the group of toddlers could break the space-time continuum and all known laws of physics, Murphy’s Law guarantees that eventually, it will happen (however centillions of years that would take). So, if by chance the toddlers did accidentally break the rules of the third dimension and formed a world-destroying creature of death and destruction, I would be guaranteed to be defeated, as J Cole so delicately puts it, “Don’t think I’m built for this sh<*>t (yeah)… I shoot my shot and it brick (yeah).” And, in this case, my shot would most certainly brick.

Hypothetical B: The toddlers accidentally create a spaceship through sheer luck and manage to contact a higher form of life that takes pity on them and decides to destroy me to prevent the loss of hundreds of millions of innocent lives.

Consider the Infinite monkey theorem. According to the infinite monkey theorem, a monkey hitting keys on a typewriter for an infinite period of time would eventually be able to recreate any famous literary work (commonly the complete works of William Shakespeare). Using this logic, we can surmise that an infinite number of toddlers doing toddler things for an infinite period of time would quite possibly eventually discover how to drill, purify, and create gasoline from oil. Furthermore, after another infinite amount of time, it is also plausible that said toddlers might discover rocket tech and the mechanics behind jet propulsion and manage to combine both, creating a primitive yet effective space exploration technology. Then, after another infinite amount of time, it could occur that said toddlers manage to not only discover but also befriend an alien species and then convince said aliens to use their ultra-advanced alien technology to destroy me. If you really get down to thinking about it, it’s really quite probable in the grand scheme of things, and I think it would be quite obvious in this situation that I would have no chance of defeating an alien race armed with unfathomably advanced technology such as lasers, spaceships, and a working justice system that doesn’t unfairly punish black people.

Hypothetical C: My mother gets angry at me for beating up children and takes away my phone for my bad behavior.

Of the hypothetical situations, this is the one most likely to actually occur. My mother is quite strict and overbearing and often treats me unfairly, so it’s not unlikely that she will become angry at me for my actions/war crimes and will decide to punish me. With no phone, I would have no way to mindlessly scroll through the same three apps for 17 hours a day and would most likely die of boredom after about 13 minutes.

Part 5: My conclusion and final thoughts

I have learned absolutely nothing from writing this article. In fact, it only took me about three hours to theorize and create the backbones for this entire article in what can only be described as a manic fit of motivation. The rest of this article took me three or four weeks but only because I had to continually rewrite and edit it to try to ensure that I wouldn’t be reported to Child Protection Services.

I would like to once again emphasize that, in no world, should anyone take the words written in this article as an incentive to hurt children. Controversial opinion here, but hurting children in any way is wrong. So (peep this big idea) don’t do it.

Anyhoo, here’s a nice quote that I found that I think will really wrap up this article with a perfect bow:

“Never let me slip, ‘cause if I slip then I’m slippin”

• Dr. Dre, ‘Nuthin But a “G” Thang’